Take a peek into daily life in East Germany at the Wende Museum on August 22, from 12 to 5 p.m. Household objects, consumer products, counterculture ephemera, and more will be on display for visitors to peruse and engage with. In addition to a display of selected materials, join historian Dr. Glenn Penny for Everyday Objects and Everyday GDR: Material Cultures and the History of Everyday Life in the Postwar Germanys, which will take place at the A-Frame Theater at 2 p.m. In this talk, Dr. Penny will discuss how everyday objects in the GDR not only helped citizens orient themselves but also played a critical role in the competition and connections between East and West.

The open house will take place on the 2nd floor of the Wende Museum’s Community Center. Digitized East German home movies from the Wende’s collection will be playing in the A-Frame Theater before and after Dr. Penny’s talk. While no RSVP is required to attend the Open House, attendees are encouraged to RSVP to the talk using the link below.

H. Glenn Penny is Professor of History and the Henry J. Bruman Endowed Chair in German History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (UNC Press, 2002), Kindred by Choice: Germans and American Indians since 1880 (UNC Press, 2013), In Humboldt’s Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology (C. H. Beck, 2019; Princeton UP, 2021); and German History Unbound: 1750s to the Present (Cambridge UP, 2022). He is currently working on two projects: Belonging and Border Bundles between Basel and Salzburg and Being German Chilean in the Interwar Period.